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ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT 
CANTON, OHIO jT SEPTEMBER 30, 1907 



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WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1907 



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ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT ^^^y 

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CANTON, OHIO sT SEPTEMBER 30, 1907 (> ) 



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WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1907 



ecl 24: 1907 

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We have gathered together to-day to 
pay our meed of respect and affection to 
the memory of William McKinley, who 
as President won a place in the hearts of 
the American people such as but three or 
four of all the Presidents of this country 
have ever won. He was of singular up- 

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Tightness and purity of character, alike in 

public and in private life; a citizen who 

loved peace, he did his duty faithfully and 

well for four years of war when the honor 

of the nation called him to arms. As 

Congressman, as governor of his State, 

and finally as President, he rose to the 

foremost place among our statesmen, 

reaching a position which would satisfy 

the keenest ambition; but he never lost 

that simple and thoughtful kindness toward 

every human being, great or small, lofty 



or humble, with whom he was brought in 
contact, which so endeared him to our 
people. He had to grapple with more 
serious and complex problems than any 
President since Lincoln, and yet, while 
meeting every demand of statesmanship, 
he continued to live a beautiful and touch- 
ing family life, a life very healthy for this 
nation to see in its foremost citizen; and 
now the woman who walked in the 
shadow ever after his death, the wife to 
whom his loss was a calamity more crush- 

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ing than it could be to any other human 

being, lies beside him here in the same 
sepulcher. 

There is a singular appropriateness in 
the inscription on his monument. Mr. 
Cortelyou, whose relations with him were 
of such close intimacy, gives me the fol- 
lowing information about it: On the 
President's trip to the Pacific slope in the 
spring of 1901 President Wheeler, of the 
University of California, conferred the 
degree of LL. D. upon him in words so 



7 
well chosen that they struck the fastidious 

taste of John Hay, then Secretary of State, 
who wrote and asked for a copy of them 
from President Wheeler. On the receipt 
of this copy he sent the following letter to 
President McKinley, a letter which now 
seems filled with a strange and uncon- 
scious prescience : 

Dear Mr. President: 

President Wheeler sent me the in- 
closed at my request. You will have the 
words in more permanent shape. They 
seem to me remarkably well chosen, and 



8 

stately and dignified enough to serve — 

long hence, please God — as your epitaph. 

Yours, faithfully, 

John Hay. 

"University of California, 

" Office of the President. 
"By authority vested in me by the re- 
gents of the University of California, I 
confer the degree of Doctor of Laws upon 
William McKinley, President of the United 
States, a statesman singularly gifted to 
unite the discordant forces of the Govern- 
ment and mold the diverse purposes of 
men toward progressive and salutary 
action, a magistrate whose poise of judg-. 
ment has been tested and vindicated in a 



9 

succession of national emergencies; good 

citizen, brave soldier, wise executive, 
helper and leader of men, exemplar to his 
people of the virtues that build and con- 
serve the state, society, and the home. 
** Berkeley, May 15, 1901." 

It would be hard to imagine an 
epitaph w^hich a good citizen would be 
more anxious to deserve or one which 
would more happily describe the qualities 



of that great and good citizen whose life 



we here commemorate. He possessed to 

a very extraordinary degree the gift of 
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lO 

uniting discordant forces and securing 
from them a harmonious action which 
told for good government. From pur- 
poses not merely diverse, but bitterly 
conflicting, he was able to secure health- 
ful action for the good of the State. In 
both poise and judgment he rose level to 
the several emergencies he had to meet 
as leader of the nation, and like all men 
with the root of true greatness in them 
he grew to steadily larger stature under 
the stress of heavy responsibilities. He 



1 1 

was a good citizen and a brave soldier, a 

Chief Executive whose wisdom entitled 
him to the trust which he received 
throughout the nation. He was not only 
a leader of men but preeminently a 
helper of men; for one of his most 
marked traits was the intensely human 
quality of his wide and deep sympathy. 
Finally, he not merely preached, he was, 
that most valuable of all citizens in a 
democracy like ours, a man who in the 
highest place served as an unconscious 



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example to his people of the virtues that 
build and conserve alike our public life, 
and the foundation of all public life, the 
intimate life of the home. 

Many lessons are taught us by his 
career, but none more valuable than the 
lesson of broad human sympathy for and 
among all of our citizens of all classes and 
creeds. No other President has ever more 
deserved to have his life work character- 
ized in Lincoln's words as being carried 
on "with malice toward none, with charity 



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toward all." As a boy he worked hard 

with his hands ; he entered the Army as a 
private soldier; he knew poverty; he 
earned his own livelihood; and by his 
own exertions he finally rose to the posi- 
tion of a man of moderate means. Not 
merely was he in personal touch with 
farmer and town dweller, with capitalist 
and wageworker, but he felt an intimate 
understanding of each, and therefore an 
intimate sympathy with each ; and his con- 



sistent effort was to try to judge all by 

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the same standard and to treat all with 
the same justice. Arrogance toward the 
weak, and envious hatred of those well 
off, were equally abhorrent to his just and 
gentle soul. 

Surely this attitude of his should be 
the attitude of all our people to-day. It 
would be a cruel disaster to this country 
to permit ourselves to adopt an attitude of 
hatred and envy toward success worthily 
won, toward wealth honestly acquired. 
Let us in this respect profit by the exam- 



15 
pie of the republics of this Western Hemi- 
sphere to the south of us. Some of these 
republics have prospered greatly; but 
there are certain ones that have lagged 
far behind, that still continue in a condi- 
tion of material poverty, of social and 
political unrest and confusion. Without 
exception the republics of the former class 
are those in which honest industry has 
been assured of reward and protection; 
those where a cordial welcome has been 
extended to the kind of enterprise which 



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benefits the whole country, while inci- 
dentally, as is right and proper, giving 
substantial rewards to those who manifest 
it. On the other hand, the poor and 
backward republics, the republics in which 
the lot of the average citizen is least desir- 
able, and the lot of the laboring man 
worst of all, are precisely those republics 
in which industry has been killed because 
wealth exposed its owner to spoliation. 
To these communities foreign capital now 
rarely comes, because it has been found 



I? 

that as soon as capital is employed so as 
to give substantial remuneration to those 
supplying it, it excites ignorant envy and 
hostility, which result in such oppressive 
action, within or without the law, as sooner 
or later to work a virtual confiscation. 
Every manifestation of feeling of this kind 
in our civilization should be crushed at 
the outset by the weight of a sensible 
public opinion. 

From the standpoint of our material 
prosperity there is only one other thing as 



i8 
important as the discouragement of a spirit 

of envy and hostility toward honest busi- 
ness men, toward honest men of means; 



this is the discouragement of dishonest 



business men. 

Wait a moment; I don't want you to 
applaud this part unless you are willing 
to applaud also the part I read first, to 
which you listened in silence. I want 
you to understand that I will stand just as 
straight for the rights of the honest man 
who wins his fortune by honest methods 



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as I will stand asfainst the dishonest man 



'&' 



who wins a fortune by dishonest methods. 
And I challenge the right to your support 
in one attitude just as much as in the 
other. I am glad you applauded when 
you did, but I want you to go back now 
and applaud the other statement. I will 
read a little of it over again. ** Every 
manifestation of ignorant envy and hos- 
tility toward honest men who acquire 
wealth by honest means should be crushed 
at the outset by the weight of a sensible 



20 

public opinion." Thank you. Now I'll 
go on. 

From the standpoint of our material 
prosperity there is only one other thing as 
important as the discouragement of a 
spirit of envy and hostility toward honest 
business men, toward honest men of 
means, and that is the discouragement of 
dishonest business men, the war upon the 
chicanery and wrongdoing which are pe- 
culiarly repulsive, peculiarly noxious when 
exhibited by men who have no excuse of 



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want, of poverty, of ignorance for their 
crimes. My friends, I will wage war 
against those dishonest men to the utmost 



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extent of my ability, and I will stand no 
less stoutly in defense of honest men, rich 
or poor. Men of means and, above all, 
men of great wealth can exist in safety 
under the peaceful protection of the state 
only in orderly societies, where liberty 
manifests itself through and under the 
law. That is what you fought for, you 
veterans. You fought for the supremacy 



22 

of the national law in every corner of this 
Republic. It is these men, the men 
of wealth, who more than any others, 
should in the interest of the class to 
which they belong, in the interest of 
their children and their children's chil- 
dren, seek in every way, but especially 
in the conduct of their lives, to insist upon 
and to build up respect for the law. It is 
an extraordinary thing, a very extraordi- 
nary thing, that it should be necessary for 
me to utter as simple a truth as that; yet 



23 

it is necessary. It may not be true from 
the standpoint of some particular individ- 
ual of this class of very wealthy men, but 
in the long run it is preeminently true 
from the standpoint of the class as a whole, 
no less than of the country as a whole, 
that it is a veritable calamity to achieve a 
temporary triumph by violation or evasion 
of the law, and we are the best friends of 
the man of property, we show ourselves 
the staunchest upholders of the rights of 
property when we set our faces like flint 



24 

against those offenders who do wrong in 
order to acquire great wealth, or who use 
this wealth as a help to wrongdoing. 

I sometimes feel that I have trenched 
a little on your province, Brother Bristol, 
and on that of your brethren, by preach- 
ing. But whenever I speak of the wrong- 
doing of a man of wealth or of a man of 
poverty, poor man or rich man, I always 
want to try to couple together the fact that 
wrongdoing is wrong just as much in one 
case as in the other, with the fact that right 



25 

is just as much right in one case as in the 
other. I want the plain people of this 
country, I want all of us who do not have 
great wealth, to remember that in our 
own interest, and because it is right, we 
must be just as scrupulous in doing justice 
to the man of great wealth as in exacting 
justice from him. 

Wrongdoing is confined to no class. 
Good and evil are to be found among 
both rich and poor, and in drawing the 
line among our fellows we must draw it 



26 

on conduct and not on worldly posses- 

> 

sions. Woe to this country if we ever get 
to judging men by anything save their 
worth as men, without regard to their 
fortune in life. In other words, my plea 
is that you draw the line on conduct and 
not on worldly possessions. In the ab- 
stract most of us will admit this. It is a 
rather more difficult proposition in the 
concrete. We can act upon such doc- 
trines only if we really have knowledge of, 
and sympathy with, one another. If both 



27 

the wage-worker and the capitalist are able 
to enter each into the other's life, to meet 
him so as to get into genuine sympathy 
with him, most of the misunderstand- 
ing between them will disappear and its 
place will be taken by a judgment 
broader, juster, more kindly, and more 
generous; for each will find in the other the 
same essential human attributes that exist 
in himself. It was President McKinley's 
peculiar glory that in actual practice he 
realized this as it is given to but few men 



28 

to realize it; that his broad and deep sym- 
pathies made him feel a genuine sense of 
oneness with all his fellow-Americans, 
whatever their station or work in life, so 
that to his soul they were all joined with 
him in a great brotherly democracy of the 
spirit. It is not given to many of us in 
our lives actually to realize this attitude 
to the extent that he did; but we can at 
least have it before us as the goal of 
our endeavor, and by so doing we 
shall pay honor better than in any other 



29 

way to the memory of the dead Presi- 
dent whose services in life we this day 
commemorate. 



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